I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Friday, May 3, 2013

April junk drawer

Welcome to the junk drawer, part of a series of monthly posts in which I dump all the stuff that I couldn't develop into full blog posts this past month. Just a bunch of quickies this month...

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May 6 is the 10th birthday of EVE Online and there are lots and lots of birthday "activities" going on. You can learn about most of them on this dev-blog. In addition, there's been a push all month to break the PCU record come the sixth. You can learn more about that effort. In particular, there are some real-life prizes being given away; you can learn about those...

Happy birthday, EVE Online!

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I'll have a bit to say about my CSM8 election predictions later today. Among my own get-out-the-vote efforts was this fun little tweet:

I'm a bad person. I've got a guy camped in my home station. I'm letting him leave in exchange for a "Ripard Teg for #csm8" poem. #tweetfleet

The eventual poem, edited somewhat for family-friendliness:

Roses are red, violets are blue;
I'm voting Ripard, and so should you.

It ain't exactly Frost, but it was enough for me to let him go. ;-)

Like myself, Rote Kapelle is -- of course -- a very serious alliance full of very serious people who of course wouldn't dream of mocking the CSM8 election process or my activities in it. They were completely supportive of all of my endeavors and had not a single teasing thing to say--

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. One of my alliance-mates sent me a tiara as a congratulations present.

I know what you are thinking. The answer is no. ;-)

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Speaking of bad people in Syndicate, amusing quote of the month for me was this gem by alliance-mate Jayarr:

Syndicate is like a maximum security prison. It keeps all the bads in.

Using public data, it breaks down the number of high-, low-, null-sec, and WH kills per week, then breaks them down again by time zone and by region. Or, want to know when your favorite corp is active or inactive? It can answer that question too, as well as active pilots, solo pilots, what types of ships they fly, and how big their fleets tend to be. It's a pretty damn awesome tool! As an intelligence tool, I'd rate it right behind evewho.com.

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Another "little thing" that I'm going to add to my little things list: it'd be nice if you could set autopilot destination to celestials like planets, belts, and POCOs. That said, CCP might be hesitant about this one because using the autopilot to warp one's pod away from one's destroyed ship after a fight is a common tactic. CCP might want to ensure such get-away pods warp to gates rather than planets or belts. Still, it's worth asking.

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And finally, this article in BusinessWeek made me smile. It's riddled with inaccuracies and stuff that's just flat-out wrong. It's not very well written. It struggles to find a focus and I think, ultimately, fails. But it continues what is apparently CCP's media push to get EVE out in front of a broader audience... Despite how bad it is, spend a few minutes reading through it. It includes some interesting snippets, including this...

Just down the road from the CCP headquarters, the Harpa, a giant glass opera house, glows in different colors at night. It symbolized Iceland’s banking boom. Now it may have to be torn down, because it’s too expensive for the country to maintain.

Aheh... [citation needed]?

And that's all for the junk drawer this month. Like I said, not a lot this time.

Hey, Jester - when are you going to do a post on the upcoming changes to T1 battleships?

Personally, I'm completely disappointed.

The battleships should have been the one class of ships which retained greater flexibility, over niche roles. Instead, they are just bigger versions of frigates.

Also, the alliance fleet-only bias is strong here, with ships like the Domi and Phoon being screwed over as omni-role ships, great for PVE and solo PVP, into mediocre fleet support roles.

The across-the-board increases to BS pricing are also biased towards alliances, and away from individuals and small corps.

CCP Rise, formerly Kil2, has turned out to be a big flop. Unlike Fozzie, who freely admitted when some of his ideas weren't good and adopted better player suggestions, Rise is simply ignoring almost all of the player feedback. His "updates" thus far have amounted to nothing but a few number tweaks, and no reversals on poor design ideas.

Rise is also acting like he has flown all of these ships extensively and understands how they are used in the game, when he has not.

Sadly, it looks like we've fallen back to the bad old days, when CCP devs, who don't actually play the game, insisted that they always know better than the players.

Yeah, have to agree with this comment, although I was originally stoked to see Kil2 at CCP.

One comment that Rise recently made on the forums really bothered me:

"... we had a good idea of what you would think, because many people internally felt the same way. We spent a lot of time talking with those people and trying to figure out if there was a different solution that fit our goals and also made them more comfortable. This is where we arrived."

He is assuming that the experience/opinion of the devs accurately reflects the experience/opinion of the players, which, ofc, it does not. The pages of player feedback disagreeing with Rise pretty much proves this fact.

Unfortunately, Rise is mostly being stubborn about defending his own position, and about refusing to give the player feedback more weight than those of the devs (most of whom have not flown many of these ships in years, if ever - certainly, none of them have had to grind ISK to buy a ship recently, as a new player).

This is the sort of attitude which leads to problems between CCP and the players, as many of us remember all too well.

I've been wondering if you would have some comments on this year's Burn Jita? I understand that a lot of things were going on at the same time, but if you have a chance I'd like to get your take on the event...

Spent the evening drinking with some locals In Reykjavik who say "yes, the Harpa is very expensive to run, but after spending all that money to build it, they don't expect it to be torn down any time soon".

so if they are thinking of pulling it down, they haven't told the locals.

From what I'm told, the "tearing down the Harpa" line is mostly a ploy by the local right-wing party. It IS operating at a loss, but it is by far the biggest venue in Iceland, and has been attracting a ton of events that previously couldn't be hosted there -- which means a huge bump in revenue for all the businesses around it. A small private loss for a huge public profit. It'll stay up.

Also, you should mention the name that your benefactor put on the shipping address :)

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